


It Should Have Been Me

by Cornerofmadness



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 04:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19221145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cornerofmadness/pseuds/Cornerofmadness
Summary: Xander struggles to come to terms with losing Anya.





	It Should Have Been Me

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** \- So not mine. All characters belong to Mr. Whedon. 
> 
> **Time Line** \- Immediately post _Chosen_
> 
> **Warning** angst
> 
> **Author’s Note** \- This was a comment_fic that sort of got out of control. It was also written for the buffyversebingo for the prompt “forbid.”

XXX

Xander rested back against the cheap hotel bed, his head a ball of pain. It was no match for the deep, ugly ache in his heart. She was gone. In those first stunned moments, he had been grateful Anya had saved his friend at the cost of his life. Now, lying here on scratchy thin hotel sheets, gratitude dissolved into vicious resentment. Some friend! Andrew had tried to kill him and Dawn, had killed Jonathan, and paid no price for that. Why had Anya died and not Andrew? Why not himself, the idiot who had left her at the altar, broken her heart, turned her back into a vengeance demon? She died for Andrew the killer. She died for _nothing_.

Clenching his jaw, struggling to keep in a howl of rage and pain, Xander couldn’t hold his muscles tight. The effort sent fire lancing through his emptied eye socket. The rage turned into bubbling agony and a soft sob escaped his lips. No, he couldn’t cry now. What would it do to his missing eye? Run into the raw, healing socket?

What did it matter? It should have been him who died, not her. Xander had dreamed of the end of the battle many times before it actually happened. In the rare times he’d let himself think they’d survive, he pictured himself, sweeping Anya away, not caring that she was a demon again. Oh the irony of that, given how much shit he’d given Buffy over dating demons. But in those dreams, he ran away with her, maybe to Vegas because she’d love the glitz. Buffy, Dawn and Willow would be with them, because of course they would. Buffy would save them again, like always, and they’d be there for him and Anya while Elvis married them: a dream turned to dust.

Anya was dead. Tara was dead. Joyce, Jenny, even Jonathan but he couldn’t feel too terrible about that. Jonathan authored too much of his own tragedy and played a role in Tara’s death in his way. But really it started with Jesse. Everything changed when he lost his best friend. The sight of Jesse as a vampire haunted him to this day. Now he lost the woman he loved fiercely, the woman he had wronged trying to protect her from the ugly he saw in himself, or at least the ugly he imagined _could_ be inside him. What a moron he was. Xander sucked in a painful, ragged gasp of air, and the tears came whether he wanted them or not.

“Xander.”

At the soft intrusion of Willow’s voice, Xander startled, his head snapping around to the adjoining door to her room. “Wills…I…oh damn, how did it all end like this?” he rasped.

Willow staggered over to his desk and sagged into the chair next to it. Dark circles raccooned her eyes and a fine tremor from adrenaline layered over exhaustion shook her. “I never thought that Sunnydale would fall into the ground, swallowed up like Atlantis under the sea.” She took his hand, squeezing it gently. “I’m so sorry, Xander. Anya didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“I don’t even have her body.” He hiccupped, trying to stop the tears. “It’s gone with the rest of Sunnydale.”

Willow stood and pushed her hip onto the bed, wrapping her arms around him. Xander crumpled against her, holding so tight he was afraid he’d crack her ribs. His missing eye throbbed like a heart beat as he wept. Willow said nothing, stroking his back, letting the torrent end on its own. He finally pushed back, and Willow handed him a thin one-ply tissue from the box on the bed stand before giving him the box.

Xander tried to clean his face, probably failed. He missed the garbage can with the tissue. “Why, Willow? She was so strong, and I’m just a human being. How am I alive, and she isn’t?”

“There’s no good answer for that, Xander,” she replied, her voice hollow.

“I can’t do this,” he said, thinking back on all that he’d lost. “I wish I could take it all back, standing her up at the altar, not being there when she died. Wish I could take back all the harsh words I spewed at Buffy when she sent Angel to hell because she had to feel just like this, probably still does. How do I go on?”

Willow took his hand again, squeezing it. “You will. We do. I’m not the one to tell you how other than don’t do what I did when Tara was killed.” She tried to smile but it failed.

Xander leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I get it now. I thought I did back then, even as I was sad for you, scared _of_ you after Tara was murdered. How do you do it? How do you put up with us? How do you not think we should have done more to help?”

“Oh Xander, that was different. Tara was killed in our bedroom. She didn’t die fighting, like Anya. That might have made it easier for me.” Willow squeezed her eyes shut. “I wanted …no, not going back there.”

Xander pulled her into a one-armed embrace. “I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t be using my pain to dredge up yours but I’m trying to wrap my head around how you can stand having him around, knowing he was working with Warren when Tara died and now Anya died saving him and I can’t…” He closed his eye, touching the tear-saturated bandage over his destroyed eye. “I didn’t want her fighting. I wanted her to run. I wanted Dawn to run. If I thought I could have forbidden it, I would have but you know how what would have gone.” He smiled wryly.

“You had no chance.” Willow patted his arm. 

“I know. Still, all that power she had, and she’s gone. I’m here. I shouldn’t _be_ here.”

Willow’s eyes well, tears spilling over. “Don’t say that Xander!”

“I can’t make it through,” he whispered.

“Xander, you can. I did. You will make it. You have _us_. Buffy survived losing Angel.”

“He came back,” Xander grumbled, bitterly.

“And Spike hasn’t. Regardless of how we feel, she carried him in her heart,” Willow said, her voice as sharp as that damnable scythe “She has lost so much. I lost Tara. Giles lost Jenny. You have people around you who have been where you are now. That’s how you make it through, Xander, just like we always have. We lean on each other. We pick each other up. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not going to promise time will heal you because I’m not sure it does. Tara’s still like an open wound in my soul, but I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Like Frodo’s morgul-blade wound.”

Willow wagged her head at his geekiness. “Yes.”

Xander licked his lips, thinking about what she had said. “I get what you’re saying. We’re all in a really crappy boat but it helps, knowing that you and the others understand this pain, that’s it not all just lip service.”

“Never. I’m always here for you. We’ve been friends forever. You know you can count of me.”

Xander wished he could entirely trust that. He knew how often childhood friendships ended but they all had this insanity binding them together. He knew Willow meant it. He smiled because he knew she wanted him to. He even felt it a little. “I know. Did our parents escape?” His parents – and hers for that matter – might never win parents of the year but he didn’t want to see them dead at the hands of monsters or at the bottom of the pit that was Sunnydale.

“Everyone got out. They know we did too,” she replied, nudging him over on the mattress. She rested her head back on the headboard, looking ready to fall asleep. “But I’m not sure what happens next.”

He sighed slipping a companionable arm around her waist. “We heal.” Xander could only hope he was right.


End file.
